Rate My Professor Gretchen Comba

Gretchen Comba is a Teaching Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, an MA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a BA in English from Florida State University. Her research interests include creative writing (fiction), short story cycles, and 20th-century U.S. literature. As part of the creative writing faculty, she plays a key role in the MFA program, frequently serving as first advisor, second advisor, or additional advisor on graduate theses in fiction and creative nonfiction.

Comba authored the short story collection The Stillness of the Picture: Stories, published by Kore Press in 2016. Her short stories have been published in Salamander ("Goatman," issue 51, 2020–2021), storySouth ("Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster," issue 50, 2020), Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The North American Review. She has also contributed scholarly work, including "William Maxwell" in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, edited by Jackson Bryer (Oxford University Press, 2017; updated Spring 2022), and "An ‘Unlikely’ Intersectionalist: Black Feminist Ethics in William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It" in MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature XL (2013): 124–139. Comba is the recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize for Short Fiction and the Yemassee Award for Exceptional Contribution to the Magazine. In 2017, she participated in a reading for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Visiting Writers Series, featured in Blackbird.